Johannesburg Temple

Johannesburg Temple

Monday, October 21, 2013

Alright, I know it's been a while since I have posted on my blog, but I have a lot for you now. I will start with my everyday life. I get up every morning at 6:30, work out until 7 and then shower and eat breakfast until 8. At 8 we have personal study for an hour, where I will read from the scriptures or what ever I need to work on. At 9 we have companion study for two hours, where we go over who we are teaching today and what we will be teaching. On Thursdays, we have weekly planning where we plan for the whole week and who we want to go visit. On Fridays we have district or zone meetings depending on the week and this is where we meet together and talk about what has been going on. When that's all done, we have lunch for an hour and then head out. Either we will have appointments or we go tracting to try and meet new people to share the gospel with. We do that until around 8 or 9 and then come back for dinner. Then we plan for the next day and retire to bed at 10:30.

The food here is pretty good. We have lots of rice and meat. We get invited into a lot of houses that have nothing, but they do their very best to give us something to eat. People are so kind here. They drink a lot of juice they buy juice concentrate and mix it with water. Its not too bad. Most of the time we have pasta or peanut butter and jelly sandwiches at home. Oh and roman noodles, gotta have that.

Driving is pretty awesome here. At first driving on the left side was crazy, but now that's all I know. I can't imagine driving on the right side of the road. Johannesburg has the highest hijacking rates in the world, so it gets pretty crazy. If you thought taxi drivers were bad in bigger cities like LA or New York, you should come here. They act like they own the road and stop for no one. At a red stoplight aka robot, they will already be through the intersection before it turns green. By the time I get home I will be more of a crazy driver. The police are corrupt here and pull you over for no reason. Sometimes they will pull you over and say buy me some McDonald's or give me money and I won't give you a ticket. We are instructed to just say give me the ticket.

We got robbed last week in the mall. My companion was using the ATM and this guy comes up and says here do this and just walks away. Another guy started yelling at that guy and then he ran off. The guy told us he stole our credit card and we had no idea. He was good. I think we lost 200 rand, which is about 20 dollars. We get about 1400 rand a month, so 140 dollars. It is not much but we make it work.

Elder Dutson and I opened a new area call Bedfordview and it is huge. I think it is around a 30 km radius. We are both new to the area, so it has been a rough beginning, but is going very well. We do a lot of tracting and driving. This is the rich part of South Africa, so all the houses are huge. The houses are like fortresses. They have walls that are 10 to 15 feet high and then an electric fence or glass on top of that. If there was a zombie apocalypse I know where I would want to be.

Its funny, in normal life Mondays are the least favorite, but when you are on a mission they are the best. It's the day off where we can take a break and go do stuff that we couldn't do on the other six days.

I would like to leave my testimony that in the first month I have been here I have grown so much. I know that God lives and I am doing His work. I am bringing happiness to people that never knew where to find it and now they have it. They now have hope and a reason to live. I wish you all the best.